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THE BOOKSHOP IS IMAGINARY. THE BOOK CLUB IS REAL. COME READ WITH ME.

May 20, 2026

A magpie in tiny half moon reading glasses sits at the head of a long folding table inside a bookmobile, gavel raised, calling a meeting to order. A copy of “Damsels and Dinosaurs” by Wren Jones is at every place setting; one setting also has a tiny cartoon dinosaur in a Regency cravat looking deeply offended. Around the table: a humanoid stack of librarian index cards in a bow tie, a sentient cup of Earl Grey with strong opinions, and the step van itself wedged in the corner having an identity crisis about whether it’s a member or just the venue. A wall clipboard reads “READING SCHEDULE 22 BOOKS / ~2 YEARS” pinned with a magpie feather thumbtack; a sticky note in panicked handwriting reads “PIVOT TO HORROR IN MONTH SEVEN ???”. Twinkle lights overhead, a whistling kettle on a camping stove. Through the back window: a fully funded brick and mortar bookstore weeping with jealousy. Soft golden lighting.

Okay so here’s the deal.

A couple days ago I wrote a love letter to my ADHD about The Magpie’s Library — the queer-centered cozy-magical bookmobile that exists entirely in a folder on my computer and, briefly, in a dream. The post was about not buying a step van. It was about how the brain that takes a single image and runs it all the way to wireframes-by-lunch is also a brain worth loving, even when the thing it built doesn’t get to be real yet.

I meant it.

I’m also, however, a person who can’t leave a good idea on the floor.

Because here’s the thing. The shop doesn’t exist. But the books exist. The list of books I’d put on those imaginary shelves is sitting right there, in a file called reading-queue.md, twenty-something hand-picked queer / Indigenous / cozy / local / sapphic / SFF titles that I’ve been planning to read anyway so I can hand-sell them with conviction to people walking into a van that has not yet been purchased.

And the people who would walk into that van? They also exist. They’re already reading. They’re already looking for this stuff. Some of you are right here reading this post.

So I’m just gonna… start.

The Magpie’s Library Book Club

One book a month. Starting now. For about two years. We read together, I post on the blog three times per book — a kickoff, a midpoint check-in, and a closing review — and once a month I send a newsletter rounding up what we read and what’s next.

It’s a book club for a bookstore that doesn’t exist yet. The bookstore is going to need an audience the day it opens. Why wait? The reading life can come first. The walls can come later.

The rules (such as they are)

  • One book a month. Slow enough for chronically ill people, working adults, parents of toddlers, and anyone whose attention is contractually owed to a small mammal. (Hi, Ramona. Hi, Jeff.)
  • The rhythm is Wednesday-Wednesday-Friday. Kickoff on the first Wednesday of the cycle, midpoint check-in two Wednesdays later, closing review the Friday after that. The next book gets announced at the bottom of the closing post. Predictable enough to plan around, sparse enough to live alongside whatever else my blog is up to.
  • Discussion lives in three places. Blog comments under each post. Social on Instagram and TikTok where I’ll yell about the book in 60-second installments. And a monthly newsletter for people who want their reading life in their inbox instead of an algorithm.
  • No quizzes. No homework. No required pace. You can skip a book. You can lurk for six months and then jump in for one you’ve been wanting to read. You can read the whole list out of order. The point is the company, not the compliance.
  • It’s free forever. It’s a book club. I’m not building a Patreon tier around the bookmobile that does not exist. Come on.

The first book

We’re kicking off with a deliberately under-the-radar pick:

Wren Jones — Damsels and Dinosaurs

It is a sapphic regency romance with dinosaurs. That is the actual logline. The Fletcher family honey business is going under. Poppy Fletcher is shipped off to a tropical island to retrieve her eccentric aunt — except the family also dispatches her arranged-marriage fiancé and her grumpy ex Athena to drag her back. There are bees that defy expectations. There are dinosaurs. It’s about six hours of reading. I read the synopsis and audibly went “oh, hell yes” in my kitchen.

And that’s exactly why we’re starting here. If the Magpie’s Library is going to be the kind of shop where you walk in and find a book you’ve never heard of that ends up wrecking you, the book club should behave the same way. Start with the recommendation you can’t get at Barnes & Noble’s front table. Start with the one a bookseller would press into your hands and say trust me.

A note on where to actually find it

Here’s a thing I want to say out loud, because the book club is going to keep running into this and we should be honest about it:

Damsels and Dinosaurs is self-published. Its current real-world buy path is Amazon. There is no Bookshop.org listing. No queer indie press is between you and this book. Wren Jones is selling it directly off her own website, the same way most sapphic mid-list authors are getting their work into the world right now — because the traditional indie distribution chain mostly doesn’t bother with them.

This is one of the actual reasons the Magpie’s Library should exist. A bookmobile that stocks books like this — that finds them, that hand-sells them in person, that puts a paperback in your hand without the algorithm in the way — is not a romantic fantasy. It’s filling a real distribution gap. We’re going to bump into that gap repeatedly over the next two years. I’m not going to pretend it’s not there.

For every book the club reads, I’ll link the most indie path that exists and a way to find it at your library. Sometimes the indie path is a real indie press. Sometimes it’s the author’s own site. Sometimes — as on book one — the most indie thing we can do is buy direct from the author and shout about it. That counts.

For Damsels and Dinosaurs:

The first read window opens Wednesday, June 3, 2026. That gives you about three weeks from when this post drops to find a copy. Kickoff post lands that day; midpoint check-in two Wednesdays later (Jun 17); closing review and Book 2 announcement on Friday Jun 26. Newsletter goes out the weekend right after.

The whole arc, briefly

After Damsels and Dinosaurs we move into cozy SF (Becky Chambers, Martha Wells), then the cozy-fantasy keystones (Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes, Rebecca Thorne, T. Kingfisher), then a deliberately complicated month around The House in the Cerulean Sea paired with an Indigenous-authored read (because if I’m hand-selling Klune, I’m hand-selling the conversation around it too, and so should we). Then sapphic romance, older queer canon, Front Range / Indigenous authors, and finally the bigger commitments — Jemisin, Butler, Yoon Ha Lee.

It’s twenty-two books. It’s just under two years. The full plan lives in the project folder; if there’s interest I’ll publish the whole list as its own post.

Why I’m asking you to do this with me

Two reasons, one earnest and one that I’m going to confess to up front.

Earnest: the world is genuinely, durably awful right now. Queer kids are getting books pulled off their school library shelves. Indigenous authors are getting reviewed as if they’re niche. Mid-list sapphic novels are getting buried by algorithms that can’t tell the difference between a love story and a logistics problem. A bookmobile is one answer to that. A reading community that prefers these books, talks about them, hand-sells them to each other, and shows up for them — that’s another answer, and it’s one I can build right now, today, with what I have, which is a blog and a couple of cats and a list and a lot of opinions.

Confession: I’m also doing this because I will not finish this reading queue without you. I know myself. I am a person who buys reading lists like they’re trading cards and gets through a third of them before falling down a different hole. If I tell you I’m going to read Damsels and Dinosaurs this month and review it for you on a specific Friday, I will actually do that. You are my accountability magpies. I am asking you to peer-pressure me into being the bookseller I want to be by the time the van is real.

Fair trade. I think.

How to join

There is no signup. There is no form. There is no app.

  • Read along with whatever we’re reading.
  • Drop a comment under the review post when it goes up.
  • Tag me on Instagram (@dylanreed) when you’ve finished a book.
  • Or just lurk. Lurking is a valid and beloved form of participation in this house.

If you want the monthly digest in your inbox, the newsletter signup is here.which is on dylanreed.com because I don’t want to manage two newsletters when I barely write one and I am totally cross polinating my sites to trick you into buying my books when they finally come out and I am not even sorry about thati am a little bit sorry

The shop is parked permanently in my imagination, like I said. The lights are always on. The club’s chairs are folding-table chairs and there’s a magpie at the head of the table with reading glasses too small for its face and a kettle is whistling on a tiny camping stove and Silver Wings is sitting at every place setting.

You’re always welcome. Pull up a chair.

Stay curious, hoard shiny things, and meet me back here in a month to talk about a book almost nobody else is reading.